It was most impressive for those who believe in the great power of totalitarianism and the inability of a fragmented society to challenge it successfully. If so, a totalitarian system can unravel only from the top down. In the Soviet Union it did. In any case, there glasnost and other measures meant to strengthen the system led to a complete collapse. To cite, as a counterpoint to Derzhavin's, Heraclites' even more famous statement: '?? ????? ???' ('Everything flows').
Part VII: RUSSIAN FEDERATION
XLIII
Much has been written about my visit to the United States both in the United States themselves and in our country; therefore, there seems to be no need to dwell extensively on its main results. There were many interesting meetings, beginning with President Bush and ending with simple Americans in city streets. I shall appeal banal, for sure, but still I was most impressed precisely by the simple people, by Americans who exude a remarkable optimism, a faith in themselves and their country. Although, of course, there were also other shocks, for instance, from a supermarket… When I saw all those shelves with hundreds, with thousands of little cans, little boxes, and so on, and so forth, I was for the first time struck with an all-embracing pain for us, for our country. To bring the richest nation to such destitution… It is terrifying.
Yeltsin (breaks in the original)*
As already indicated, after Gorbachev's resignation on the twenty-fifth of December 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin remained as the undisputed master of the Kremlin. Engineer by profession and Party administrator by occupation, Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin rose by dint of hard and driving work to the top of Party ranks during the last years of the Soviet regime. Party secretary and thus 'boss' of the very important Sverdlovsk region for a number of years, he was transferred to head the Moscow Party organization. Yet because of his criticism of Gorbachev and of the slowness of the ongoing reform, he was dismissed from that position at a meeting of November 11, 1987, which - judging by his writings - remained with him as a nightmare ever since. Blocked in the party, from which he resigned in July 1990, Yeltsin turned to the newly possible independent career in the Russian republic, which culminated in his becoming the first President of Russia after a sweeping electoral victory on June 12, 1991, and thus its most important figure to this day.
Yeltsin's career, as well as his pronouncements and his writings (especially the two autobiographical books he produced with his friend the young journalist Valentin Yumashev), depict an extremely high-strung individual, a courageous fighter, and a very poor loser, on occasion volatile and unpredictable. This frequent and at times very serious illnesses and heavy drinking further complicate evaluations of his actions and aims. Still, it is worth remembering that Yeltsin surged past Gorbachev on the Left, not on the Right, i.e., favoring the breakup
*Boris Yeltsin,
of the Soviet Union and a major reform of Russia. Even more a Soviet and a Party product than Gorbachev, for he came from a still poorer, indeed semi-starving, background, and had no cultural baggage except that provided by the Soviet system, Yeltsin broke with that system more sharply and decisively. No adjusted Leninism or nostalgia for him. Whether the two men represent progressive stages of the transition from Communism to a new Russia, or whether their differences were merely idiosyncratic and personal, is for future historians to decide. Needless to say, Yeltsin's ideological reorientation did not change his career-long political manner of an authoritarian Communist boss. Notably, as one studies his battle with his legislatures, one has to recognize that time and again both sides acted illegally.
All in all, one should probably grant sincerity to Yeltsin in his desire to transform Russia into a capitalist, or at least market-oriented, and democratic state. The first probably means to him above all a great abundance of material goods, as in an American supermarket. The second signifies especially an abolition of Communist control and restrictions with real popular participation in political life, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Yeltsin is something of a populist, and he owes his initial rise to the very top to popular appeal and popular election. Not an economist himself, he repeatedly put his confidence in such economic reformers as Anatoly Chubais, Yegor Gaidar, or Sergei Kiriyenko. Only this confidence did not last long. The enormous difficulties of the reform process and the opposition of the increasingly powerful interests that did not want economic reform, or at least that particular kind of economic reform, made the President retreat repeatedly and try something else. In this tortuous process Yeltsin, like Gorbachev before him, was vilified from all sides, and time and again buried politically if not physically by foe and even friend. Once the most acclaimed politician in Russia, Yeltsin's support in opinion polls would drop to as low as 2 or even 1 per cent. Yet Yeltsin has refused to die either physically, in spite of a very dangerous bypass operation and constant illness, or even politically, but would actively reemerge, greatly assisted by the extremely strong position of the President in the Russian constitution, often to fire leading figures in the government and change its course somewhat. George Breslauer and other specialists have commented trenchantly on this idiosyncratic ruling style. The Russian President's ability to survive and even to remain, at least in a sense, on top of Russian politics, has continuously baffled many observers, and it even led some of them to despair. Survivability, however, exacted a heavy price. Most commentators came to interpret Yeltsin's behavior simply in terms of his determination to hold on to his position rather than as a pursuit of any economic or political principles.
It was in November, 1991, that Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais joined Yeltsin's government. Gaidar was appointed deputy prime minister for economic reform on November 7, 1991, first deputy prime minister on March 2, 1992, and acting prime minister on June 15, 1992, to be replaced by prime minister Viktor
Chernomyrdin on December 14, 1992. Gaidar returned to the government as first deputy prime minister in charge of the economy in September 1993 only to be dismissed again in January 1994. Chubais became minister for privatization and chairman of the State Committee for the Management of State Property (G.K.I.). He was to serve in several important capacities later and, like other of Yeltsin's assistants, would fall in and out of the President's favor. But privatization remains his main contribution to the transformation of Russia. As one specialist put it, Chubais 'had the organizational talent to create the G.K.I. from scratch; he skillfully navigated through the rifts of conflicting political and economic interests. He demonstrated rare determination and staying power to see this grandiose project through to its conclusion,' Yet, perhaps inevitably, the reform attracted as much blame as praise. In part because the legislature modified Chubais's original scheme, its result was a sweeping appropriation of state possessions, sometimes on an enormous scale, by a relatively small group of people already in charge of them or connected to those in charge - a major contribution to the ongoing differentiation between the poor and the very rich.
Economic reform in general had similar and still other problems to confront. There was much effort and considerable accomplishment. Even if Russia was slow to move in new economic directions, it was not as slow as, for example, Ukraine. And all the economies switching from Communism to the market have experienced major difficulties, including that of East Germany, in spite of its great special advantages. Together with the privatization of state property, private enterprise rapidly spread in Russia, ranging from the activities of leading international companies to those of the uncounted and often miserably poor local entrepreneurs. Moscow and to a lesser extent St. Petersburg and other cities acquired a great variety of consumer goods of every kind, impossible even to imagine in Soviet times. In fact, luxury items, such as Mercedes cars, became particularly prominent. Concurrently Russians obtained the unrestricted right to travel abroad, and colonies of rich Russians appeared in the French and the Italian Rivieras, in Switzerland, and on Greek islands. The ruble, first subject to inflation, which cost many people their entire savings, seemed to stabilize in 1996 and 1997. 1997 was a good year on the Russian stock exchange, and foreign investment in the country picked up pace.
Yet, in truth, the economy had been running down. Gorbachev's indiciseveness and years lost for fundamental
